Reading Time: 2 minutesMany people use the term “Agile ceremonies” as a collective term for activities like standups, retrospectives, reviews and planning. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the word “ceremony” in this context. It’s never sat well with me and I don’t like using it with people who are new to agile ways of working. I’ve been thinking […]
A decent remote show and tell set up
Reading Time: 4 minutesMany organisations work with dispersed teams or stakeholders, so there must be an easy way to do an engaging remote show and tell, surely… right? I couldn’t find one, this post is the result of my research to find my own and a guide for others.
How community, social networks and building habits helped me get fitter and healthier
Reading Time: 5 minutesThat might sound like a bit of an odd title on my blog but bear with me. I have spent the last year making some changes in myself and I’ve used everything I know about how people work, approaches to change and experimentation in order to do that. This post talks about how I went […]
Mapping skills and capabilities with communities of practice
Reading Time: 3 minutesI first wrote about skills mapping in my book Building successful communities of practice. This post digs a little deeper into identifying skills and capabilities with communities of practice. Skills and capability maps help organisations identify gaps and where to invest in skills development. So it makes sense that many want to create them. At a […]
Should you call people resources?
Reading Time: 1 minuteI’m a big believer that language and the words you use say a lot about a culture, and that we can take steps to change culture through changing those words. Words can make people feel excluded, unappreciated and overlooked. I try to make conscious decisions about the words that I use and will phase out […]
The team collaboration party game
Reading Time: 3 minutesI recently put a workshop together to take a new team through to help describe some important agile concepts including the benefits of working collaboratively and swarming on tasks; the value of communication; how to self-organise; how limiting work in progress achieves more value and what we mean by T-shaped teams. The workshop itself was a […]
The 4 Ps of effective standups
Reading Time: 2 minutesThis is a quick blog post with some tips for effective stand-ups that a friend asked me to write so he could share it with someone else. So here it is Mark. These 4Ps came to life when I was working with Amy Wagner creating and delivering some training in Brussels. The training was intended to […]
Conference speaker needs
Reading Time: 1 minuteAbout a month ago I put together a list of needs for conference speakers. I’d been thinking about it because I’ve been speaking at a fair few conferences recently and seen various approaches by different organisers. I’ve also seen important information missed that I and other speakers could have benefitted from up front. I know how […]
Understanding needs for building digital / agile capability
Reading Time: 2 minutesI do a fair bit of training with organisations who want to become more agile. The conversation often starts with “can you give agile training to our staff?”. This is a starting point for a conversation but needs a bit more digging before I can understand what the real need is and what outcome we should […]
What learning to knit has reminded me about learning
Reading Time: 4 minutesI have recently taken up knitting (as anyone that follows me on Instagram will know) and as well as helping me build an increasing collection of brightly coloured hats, it’s helped remind me about the process of learning and how this relates to people learning agile. Which is always a good reminder as an agile […]
Mapping influencers through an authority lens
Reading Time: 4 minutesAt a recent Agile on the bench meetup, Matthew Butt gave a great talk called Hacking Authority in which he explored different types of authority that exist within organisations. It is a really interesting lens that can be used to view influencers in an organisation and I’ll be using it for a workshop very soon to create […]
Avoiding groupthink and echo chambers: diversity and the multidisciplinary team – a short talk
Reading Time: 5 minutesIf you read my blog, then you’ll know that I have an interest in diversity and I also run a meetup called Agile on the Bench. At the Feb meetup I joined forces with Lakshan Saldin to give a 10 min talk about how diversity, groupthink and echo chambers affect our teams. Here is what we said….